Thursday, August 9, 2012

I am going to talk to you about some of my thinking
around badges, assessment and the often talked about, but never before
explained concept of Webmaker+.

When
we talk about the tools and resources that we are building at Mozilla
we often contextualize them as learning experiences. So, for example,
you might go to Webmaker.org - find a project- make and publish that
project and along the way gain some basic HTML skills. However, in our
current model, you could very well walk away after publishing your
project and have no realization that you just learned something. And-
because of that, you might not be able to level up your tinkering to
craftsmenship. Check out the vidcast to hear more:

(and based on the unexpected fanclub I've gained from my singing on the last vidcast, I have some special singing action here for you today)

In the vidcast, I showed 4 wireframe iterations for incorporating badges and embedded assessment into Thimble.

Iteration #1:

I started to imagine the
badges appearing as you accomplish various things, taking a cue from the
Cheevos system. It would look something like this ^^ Cons: the badge is super intrusive and could be
distruptive to the learners experience. Pros: the actual "ingredients"
displayed in the badge

Iteration #2:

Imagine the orange tab subtly
popping up almost as if it is coming out of the toolbar. You then have
the ability to transition to the next slide where you can add the badge
to your backpack and share via social media. But is this too subtle?

Iteration #3

badge icon in toolbar wiggle when you receive badges (nothing pops up till you click it)

on click, you can see your badges- so if you have earned 4 badges- it will appear as a slide show

Iteration #4: Webmaker +

As you see here, we could add a
nav bar that gives a user the ability to opt in to the community, once
they join, they are essentially signing in to be part of the game. It
then becomes almost like an exclusive layer that sits on top of the
software- which by the way could be thimble and popcorn but
also community designed tools. The badge here could actually
reflect data that is unique to the user. So for example, if they
indicated that they were trying to achieve the goal of learning HTML and
earning the uber HTML basics badge, then the badge could reflect that
progress as well.

Extra Iteration:

With Webmaker+, the badge backpack gets transformed into a user dashboard, where they could see their progress, but also control it- so they can set goals, join challenges, and add badges.

This is an initial brainstorm. To get a better understand of what we are thinking about specifically at Mozilla in relationship to the badges that we issue, head over to Chloe Varelidi's blog ( Chloe, did the map I featured in the video). We have been talking about this webmaker+ layer for quite a while and have been letting the ideas percolate. In terms of feedback, I would love to hear from your thoughts, but specifically:

1. If we were to implement the pink iteration (webmaker +) would the "dashboard" (last image above) be something that lives uniquely on the webmaker site and leverages the Mozilla webmaker community, or would it be a more open ended tool that anyone, anywhere could tap into that gets featured and promoted through the Mozilla Webmaker site?